by Jeter, K W
“No hooker,” she said, “is going to make any money in L.A. unless she has a specialty. And without money, she isn’t going to have a friend or anything else that’s nice to have. So, one way or another, she gets ahold of Dr. Adder. He dopes her out and peeks in her skull with this ADR stuff, and finds out what she’d be good at, or what parts she wouldn’t mind losing. Then he does it, back there in his operating room. Oh yeah, and sometimes he runs it on some fat rich guy and finds out what he’d really like to do, but is too afraid to admit to himself. That’s all.”
Droit rolled his eyes up to the ceiling.
“You know,” said Limmit to both of them, “he could be a fake. There might be no ADR at all. He just saws away however he pleases, and the suckers bang away at the results, believing because of his reputation that he must be right.”
“There’s a possibility of that,” admitted Droit. “I’ve never been under the ADR, so I can’t say for sure. But Adder doesn’t like to trick people. He likes being strong enough to tell them flat out what he’s going to do to them, and then doing it. And everybody digs it, of course.”
“This whole thing is hopeless,” said Limmit. A sudden wave of despair surged over him again. He had fallen into the hands of some mad doctor who extracted great bloody lizards from people’s brains and then chopped away until the people resembled them. A surgeon who cut out carcinomas and threw away the rest of the living body as not wanted. Adder was probably capable of turning Limmit into a toad for minor annoyance, like some childhood nightmare. And here he sat, talking it over with L.A.’s last and cheapest independent social researcher and some stark-naked chick with amputee ambitions. “Hopeless,” he muttered again.
“It passes the time,” said Droit. With a grin, somewhat malicious, he picked up from beside the girl’s left thigh on the desk a small ticking clock inscribed “To Dr. Adder, Best Regards, Admiral Sennet,” and displayed its face to Limmit. The hands had been replaced with miniature scalpels.
The flanks of the motorcycle lay dappled in the leaf-filtered sunlight. Adder trod over the moist layers of decaying leaves and other soft vegetation to the door of Betreech’s residence and factory. The door was only visible as a slightly less overgrown patch in what seemed to be a general facade of dark vines and leaves. Adder brushed aside several of the vines, found a small metal button, and depressed it, hearing the loud, raucous buzz inside the house. No answer came. “Motherfuck,” said Adder, and bent down to dig through a layer of decomposing greenery nearly a half-foot thick at the base of the door. He uncovered a rotting doormat (WELCOME), spotted with bright dots, colonies of mold. Beneath the mat was a brass key.
Inside the house, after the door swinging open had deposited a residue of dust, cobweb fragments, and dried birdshit on his head and shoulders, Adder shouted Betreech’s name. Again there was no answer. The sound of his voice seemed to travel only a few feet before it was sopped up by damp carpets and drapes, lush with mildew and rot. Adder’s shouts seemed to have as much weight as the cheap veneer peeling off the suburban petit bourgeois furniture that had been in the house when Betreech had acquired it, and never bothered to dispose of. One of the house’s encircling vines had managed to penetrate the wall, but had not got very far, becoming despondent and sickly in the light-scarce gloom inside the house. This had left the field open for the vine’s microscopic, airborne cousins. The fabric of the couch and chairs was gradually being replaced by a richer, self-renewing velvet; the chintzy end- and coffee-tables became lacquered with dull and intricate finishes, evolved and bent by moisture into shapes undreamed of in the bright eyes of long-dead faggot interior decorators.
“What a mess,” said Adder softly, being an admirer himself of the baroque that springs up from the intricacies of filth. He walked into the kitchen where the stairs into the cellar had been plunged, wondering if anything would sprout from the garbage in his lab back on the Interface, if he kept it as moist as up here in the thickening jungles of the Hollywood hills. He tended to doubt it. A vividly garish mold, sprung from one last peach-half left forgotten in its can sitting on the edge of the sink (one of many in various stages of rebirth), dripped down the wood cabinet, pointing to the trap door set into the buckling linoleum floor. A series of ketchup dots disappeared, the last neatly bisected, at the edge of the trap door. They were still fresh, as Adder could tell by smudging one with the toe of his boot. At least he’s still alive, thought Adder as he pulled open the trap by its metal ring and descended.
At the bottom of the stairs, three bare concrete corridors split off at forty-five-degree angles. From the first two on the right, Adder could hear the varied noises of Betreech’s autonomic pharmacological factory, muffled only slightly by the several weighty intervening doors. I might have known, thought Adder disgustedly, seeing the pale sheet of light emerging from beneath the door at the end of the short corridor to the left. As he stepped toward it, he could hear a familiar, rapidly slapping sound.
Inside, Betreech lay sprawled diagonally in the centermost of a group of a dozen upholstered theater chairs. The only illumination in the room was the large white rectangle cast against one wall by an antiquated motion picture projector. The projector’s take-up reel spun relentlessly, slapping the tail end of some film against the lens housing. Adder strode to the projector, switched it off, and turned on the lights. The unconscious old man was dressed in a woman’s Civil War-period crinoline ball gown, the long white skirt of which was rucked up past his thin, blue-veined legs to his narrow waist. His naked hipbones stuck out like butterflies swathed in dough. One hand still cradled his now detumescent flesh; a small liquid stain trailed down one thigh, matching the trail of saliva from his mouth, subject to the same gravitational pull. Adder caught the scent of the breath that whistled out of the old man’s mouth, observed the dead pipe, stuffed with ashes, balanced carefully on the arm of the chair. “Ah, Betreech,” he muttered. “Beating your meat at age eighty-plus, just like some brain-fogged old geriatric in an Orange County rest home.”
Adder retreated out the door and returned in a few minutes with a glass of water from the upstairs kitchen, in the cleanest glass discoverable in a short search. “Come on, old scout,” he said, bringing the glass and the old man’s lips together. “You’re going to dehydrate your tongue some day, going to sleep with your mouth open like that.”
The old man’s mouth sipped automatically at the water, then consciousness spread outward from the vegetative functions of the brain. Two unfogged, slightly reddened eyes fluttered open. Seeing Adder, the withered head smiled, which, in combination with the antebellum outfit, gave the impression of a gay mummy laid to rest in drag and come alive again. “Ah, Adder,” the old man said, apologetically dabbing at the drying semen with one edge of the crinoline skirt. “Come upon me in the midst of my little vice, eh?”
Dr. Betreech’s little vice consisted of dressing up like characters in his collection of old Hollywood films and stroking himself to a climax at the thought of the sexual activity imagined to be occurring in the ellipsis between one cut and another. “Jerk off, smirk off,” said Adder. “As long as you’re happy.” He remembered the time he discovered Betreech here dressed in a baggy fur ape suit scrounged up for him from an abandoned costume shop in the slums, and excitedly claiming to have discerned four explicitly sexual ellipses in the last surviving print of the 1933 King Kong—as simian pure a film, thought Adder, as Betreech had ever shown him from his collection. It was alarming how much Betreech had aged since then, only a few years ago: Now, the small violence of each film-inspired orgasm left him unconscious. It all reminded Adder idiotically of a description he had heard as a kid of some apocryphal male (black, naturally) who had an organ so big that when fully erect, the loss of blood from other parts of the body caused him to black out. Maybe Betreech’s brain, exercising overtime to supply the (to him) missing party of all these old flicks, had grown the same way.
“So,” said Betreech, sipping at his glass of water, the crinol
ine skirt down primly to his ankles, “what brings you up here? Just visiting a lonely old man? Unusually thoughtful of you.” Perched on the back of the theater seat in front of the old man, Adder shifted uneasily. “Come off it,” he said. They had gone through all this before, as if life had become looped somehow and threaded into Betreech’s projector. “Why try to make me feel guilty, for Christ’s sake? Do you expect me to come up to stay and cook for you, clean up that terminal mess upstairs? Nursemaid you while you rot into senility with one hand wrapped around your decayed old prick?”
“I still don’t think you understand much of anything,” murmured the old man. “Go live your own life out, see if I care. I worry about you—is that all right? I’m old enough to be your father, I set you up in business; allow me that much at least.” “Great,” muttered Adder. “I’ve got the world’s largest dope pusher for a Jewish mother. So what do you want already?” he yelled suddenly. “A signed and notarized confessional of all I owe you? Bill my office for it, you old pervert.”
“You’re too defensive,” sighed Betreech, shaking his head, giving up. “All right, what did you come up for?”
Adder sulkily told him about the flashglove. Perhaps Betreech’s more extensive contacts within the Rattown underworld and with the mysterious suppliers of his raw materials had leaked some knowledge concerning it and the plot behind.
“Haven’t heard a thing,” said Betreech. “Maybe this character who showed up with it acquired it honestly, or at least the way he says he did, and Mox bugged it without his knowledge. What did the fellow say his name was?”
“Allen Limmit. He says Lester Gass was his father, and he inherited it from him.”
“Might be,” said Betreech. “Gass did have a son who would be about that age now. When I was still an honest anesthesiologist I assisted at Mrs. Gass’ delivery, in a CIA hospital. Seems a lot longer ago than twenty-odd years.”
“Mmm,” said Adder, stroking his chin meditatively. “What do you suppose I should do about the thing?”
“Are you asking me for advice? Don’t buy it. There’s quite a few stiff laws left over from when the CIA was disbanded against unauthorized persons possessing a live flashglove. Obviously Mox is trying to set you up for some kind of a bust, thinking that the heaviness of the crime would be enough to circumvent his partners’ and your friends’ conniving to protect you. I’d say drop it—maybe turn in this Limmit character, like a good citizen.”
“Don’t give me that shit,” said Adder. “I want it.”
“Why? To complete your image? One useless machine like your motorcycle isn’t enough, you need another power symbol? You wouldn’t be able to graft it on without giving up your fine lucrative practice, which you need two skilled surgeon’s hands for. Give that up, and your former friends couldn’t care less while Mox had it and you deactivated.”
“Look, I just want it, okay?” said Adder. “Just to have, not to use.”
“What a dumb schmuck,” said Betreech. “He wants to have it just as proof that he can have it. Big bad Adder—ain’t nothing he can’t do.”
“Fuck off.”
“It means so much to you, find your own damn way to get it.” The brown-spotted hands angrily pressed the crinoline’s wrinkles out against his lap. “Remember you have ‘friends’ willing enough to do you favors. Why ask my advice?”
“Thanks a lot,” said Adder, springing from his perch. “You’re a real fuckin’ help.”
Betreech followed him up the stairs, through the moldering house’s kitchen and front room, out the door, and watched as Adder mounted his motorcycle. “Don’t worry,” the old man called out, conciliatory, from the front doorway. “You’ll work it out all right.”
Adder grunted, then spoke. “Take it easy on those movies. No double bills from now on, all right?” Without looking around for Betreech’s nod, he kicked over the engine and slid off down the hill trail packed with dead leaves. He looked around once and saw the old man still watching his progress, the expression on his face made indiscernible by distance, but the fragile antique crinoline gown glowing in the fragmented afternoon sunlight.
* * *
“All right,” said Adder, seating himself down behind his desk. He balled up the white lab coat, money included, and wiped the street’s dust from his face. In front of him, Droit looked composed and inquisitive, the young hooker seated on the desk vapid, and the still mysterious Limmit nervous and extremely uncomfortable. He’s probably been frozen like a rabbit since hearing my cycle snarl into the courtyard a minute ago, thought Adder. “Enough of this futzing around. You, Droit, give me back the gun and bug off. Yeah, don’t worry, I’ll let you know of any developments. You”—he prodded the girl in one buttock —“get back in the other room. I’ve got enough trouble keeping this place neat and tidy without every broad-assed hooker in L.A. sweating all over my business papers.”
As the two departed silently, Adder swiveled his chair in Limmit’s direction. “You,” he said, wagging the gun at Limmit for emphasis, “stay right where you are. I’ve got a little phone call to make.” He got up, keeping part of his vision and the gun pointed toward Limmit, and searched through several molder-ing piles of debris. A stack of vintage skin magazines tottered, then avalanched in a flow of pink and brown photos, revealing a telephone behind them.
Limmit heard him punch out a number. Adder seemed to be in a good humor: what did that mean? “Give me General Romanza,” he thought he heard Adder say behind his back. “I don’t care,” continued Adder in a louder voice, “you stupid capon. Just put him on.” Pause. “Well, when he gets back tell him to call Dr. Adder. Don’t forget, or it’ll be your ass.” Adder sat down behind the desk again. He stroked the gun’s barrel with one forefinger, and smiled crookedly at Limmit. “Why don’t you,” he said, “tell me all about it. Who you are and where you got the flashglove.”
“My name really is Limmit. I am Lester Gass’ son. I got the flashglove back in Phoenix. A GPC exec named Joe Goonsqua flew out to the egg ranch and gave it to me. He arranged for me to come out here and try to sell it to you; I don’t know why. I was to keep whatever I got from you for the glove as my profit in the deal.”
“Jesus,” said Adder. “And you fell for that? A setup like that smells wrong about twenty different ways. A frame for me, and a nice way to get burned or killed for you.” He tossed the gun on the desk beside the black briefcase and tilted back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head. “You know,” he said, “I really believe you. I can’t help feeling for you. Just another punk kid out looking for an honest con. Just like me a while back, before I hooked up with old Dr. Betreech. If it weren’t for him, I’d probably be a specialist in some Orange County medical center right now, with a heavy trank habit, ulcers, and children. Puts me in a nostalgic mood, yes indeed.” He fell silent for a moment, deep in reverie. Suddenly the chair descended back onto all four legs and Adder leaned across the desk toward Limmit. “How would you like to work for me? I need a new assistant; my old one got snuffed last night.”
“I was on the street,” said Limmit. “I saw—”
“Yeah? Don’t worry about it, it’s not an occupational hazard or anything. Purely accidental, risks of city living, you know. How about it?”
This took some consideration. Limmit felt partly numb with shock. If his fortunes took any more sudden falls and rises he was afraid his lunch would follow them next. “I don’t know,” he said, and laughed nervously. “What would I have to do?” “Just general hassling. And give me a hand at the operating table. Know anything about surgery?”
Limmit told him of his work with a scalpel at the egg ranch’s brothel.
“That’s more than that dud Pazzo knew,” said Adder. “In your case, you’d already be halfway to picking up a good trade. Earn while you learn.”
“Why me?”
Adder shrugged and spread his hands. “Who can I find in L.A. that would work out? Everybody here is on some image kick, even me to some extent, th
ough I’ve got mine under control. I need someone who can cut through all this obsessive crap, deal with just profit and cash.”
“Maybe,” said Limmit. He gazed around the dingy office. “But if I’m going to stay here in L.A. I want to know a few more things. You don’t have to be one in order to want to know a little about lunatics, especially if you’re locked in the homicidal ward. Droit told me about that ADR of yours, and why all the top GPC guys are so stuck on you they even let you operate down here at all. All except this John Mox, that is. If your fans are running around taking potshots over our heads at his fans, I want to know what the story is.”
It’s not much. A sort of joke. Some people actually don’t find it funny, though. I suppose it wouldn’t be fair for you to sign on without having heard it.
About the time I was graduating from high school, which is a ways back, the exec board at the Greater Production Corporation decided to initiate a new program for some of their factory workers. Volunteers were to get cash bonuses, and toasters, TV sets, et cetera, for undergoing surgery designed to improve their job performance. GPC bigfarts figured they’d save a bundle by retooling their workers’ arms and hands to flex in different ways, assume different stress and load capacities, and so on, rather than retooling or redesigning a lot of expensive machinery. After all, if you’ve got some apparatus that performs about two hundred separate functions on a plastic flange extrusion, it’s cheaper to alter your assembly line workers to handle the item in the factory’s most efficient way, rather than trying to build the machine to fit all its actions to be within natural human capabilities, right?
So anyway, a small problem—no medical personnel geared up and specially educated to do the necessary surgery. Big Orange County-wide aptitude test, I get in it by accident, and they pick me, both for my high natural ability and the GPC’s desire to kill two birds with one stone. I had some so-called “personal adjustment problems” when I was a kid. This way, they could show what a productive citizen I had been therapied into. Me, I just wanted some soft job with lots of spare time for my hobby, personal vegetation. They ship me off to the Auckland Medical Center in New Zealand. Not many people around here are even aware there is such a place. There I meet up with Dr. Betreech, the screwed-up med student’s unofficial friend and adviser. He was working up to being deported for peddling illicit substances. Things happen.